Flower power from perennials

When it comes to gardening, I have two words for you:

Perennials.

Weeds.

As I have gotten older, my gardening has become less ambitious. In that way, I am not true to family tradition.

The generations before me -- my mother and grandmother -- continued to raise all sorts of annual vegetable crops and bright flowers as they attained ages well beyond the age I am now. They spent sultry Missouri afternoons diligently hoeing between the rows in our garden. I did, too. We wore homemade sunbonnets, fashioned of printed cottons, to shield our necks and faces.

That once-large garden has become lawn now, for the most part, though Concord grapes still vine on the fence that used to separate the garden from the orchard, and there yet may be some raspberry bushes, a remnant of a cousin's passing enthusiasm, clinging to life.

Now it's true that the women who gardened before me also nurtured perennials: lilies of the valley, sweet-scented grape hyacinths, old-fashioned rose bushes that smelled the way heaven surely does, and irises in both yellow and purple. Those perennials came up every year; we did little to encourage them. The annuals were enthusiastically planted and weeded, too.

As I write, I gaze at a photograph of my mother, in her late 70s or early 80s, standing in the midst of flowers in every color: cosmos, zinnias, hollyhocks, "rose pinks" that had a spicy perfume, like cloves. Despite the faded colors of the photo, I can remember how this cacophony of bright flowers looked. Over her left shoulder, I catch a glimpse of a vivid red gladioli, and she is holding two of her fine muskmelons.

When I began to describe my mother's garden to the florist who was going to supply the flowers for her casket, I did not get far. "Is your mother's house the first one west of the Granger corner?" the florist asked. "I always saw that garden, that riot of color."

Looking at the scene in the photo makes me feel tired. I know how much labor, how much sweat, it took to make that garden.

So I turn, now, to perennials and biennials: foxgloves (digitalis) like the ones in Charles Darwin's garden, sweet peas, daffodils, narcissus, iris, grape hyacinths and the day lilies some people disparage as "ditch flowers." Those day lilies take off in a gratifying way; five I planted last year have become 14 this year.

My grandmother always asked for a "slip," as she called cuttings from plants, when she admired a flower on someone else's windowsill or in their garden. She rooted many of these free plants in water.

I think, too, of self-seeding plants such as the sky-blue bachelor's buttons I planted out by the mailbox last year, and deep pink rose campion with its dusky leaves. Once started, rose campion grows like a weed. Maybe some consider it a weed. I don't care. An attractive weed can be a welcome plant.

Even weeds that are rarely if ever thought of as flowers might make a garden festive. I wish I could recall and give credit to the person who said she was planning on planting a garden of Queen Anne's lace and chicory, both from the roadside. It is a tempting notion, because weeds grow practically overnight. (In fact, I planted some chicory in the yard one summer. Don't tell my neighbors, please.) "God must love the common man, he made so many of them," Abraham Lincoln said. No doubt God feels the same way about weeds.

I think back with nostalgia for the time I grew a hill of 50 purple Peruvian potatoes out of some forgotten farmer's market spuds that had sprouted.

Last year, I ordered precious saved trillium seeds but was unable to plant them as I struggled through the pain and surgeries of a hip revision. (It takes a lot of doing to grow these woodland beauties; the seeds take 2 years to germinate and another 2 to 5 years to flower. Do not embark on this unless you are committed. To find out if you are up to the challenge, visit trilliumsunlimited.com and click Propagation Info on the right-side menu.

During the same time period, I gave up my Celeste fig tree because of too much shade, too little tilled soil. In a sunny spot at my friend Jane Hunt's house, "Celeste," as we call her, is thriving and has five figs. It felt liberating to give Celeste up.

Setting the fig tree free was a kind of metaphor for my new gardening philosophy. If it's not working, I move on with a glad heart.

No more will I plant three kinds of chile peppers for the deer to enjoy with their garden salads. I plant what grows with gusto. When I interviewed Julia Child for a story, a few years before she died, she told me that she did not cook "as loudly" as she once did. Well, I don't garden as loudly as I once did.

Weeds? I cherish the ones that flower.